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For the past several weeks, now, there has been a movement to occupy Wall Street. Since “Wall Street” is slang for “anything finance” this technically means a protest that has centered around the financial centers of several and even many cities by now. This is getting too large to ignore or dismiss.

First off I must admit to pulling a tl;dr;hoa (too long, didn’t read, have opinion anyway) here. I have not followed the movement in detail, so my comments on this subject is more of a general nature.

While the Occupy Wall Street movement have a diverse number of opinions and operational world views, they do have one thing in common. They understand that they’ve been screwed over but they do not seem to understand why they’ve been screwed over.

Fair enough. However, this is where I have a problem. I’ve been listening to people talk about their financial troubles for a good four years by now (it comes from having a blog about it) and I’ve noticed something that makes me frustrated and sad. A person will come to me and explain how they’re up to their eye-balls in debt and how they’re struggling and how it’s all [opposing political party]’s fault, and how they’re a victim of their circumstances and things would be better if only we could enact [laws of favorite political party].

I proceed to tell them that first the [opposing political party] vs. [favorite political part] is a false dichotomy(*) but more importantly that they can do something about it. I explain how I become independent of the whole consumer-debt system and how they could do the same.

(*) Having had their entire world framed in red vs blue explains part of what the current confusion is about because the issue is really ruling class vs middle class and the middle class have been in denial of the fact that their democracy might be somewhat … uh, rigged against them.

But people are not interested in solutions.

On the most basic level, I realize that whenever people talk about their problem, at least some of them desire empathy rather than solutions. However, if you’re out in the [for now, figuratively] bloody street holding uup a sign, you’re not there because you want me or someone else to walk over and pat you on the back *there, there* to feel all better.

You probably want solutions.

It’s, however, pretty hard for most people to admit that they’re the cause of their own problems. If only they hadn’t bought a $400,000 house on a $80,000/year salary. If only they didn’t spend $3,000 per year or clothes and hairdressers, $20,000 on gas and car payments, $2,000 per year on entertainment, $100,000 on that degree in English literature from a small by trendy liberal arts college, and oh yeah, $118 on books to educate themselves, then maybe they’d be way better off financially speaking.

So let me give you a piece of advice. People don’t want to hear that. They much prefer to blame someone else, so if you value your social capital with them, just nod and agree.

Now, one has to wonder why most people don’t say: “Curses, I’ve been so stupid. Thank you for explaining why I’ve been screwed over. I’m going to make sure not to let that happen again. I’m going to bring my finances in order because ultimately I realize that nobody can screw me over unless I let them and I’m not going to let that happen again”?

Aristotle discussed the concept of “natural slaves.” A natural slave is “someone who doesn’t think but just does.” In modern language it would be someone who prefers to avoid deep responsibility for their actions. Aristotle realized that it was difficult to predetermine who was a natural slave and who wasn’t. It wasn’t a question of stature, e.g. natural slaves being more muscular but walking less upright. Some comments were made as to the fact that being a natural slave had more to do with one’s mentality than any physical characteristics. Aristotle got it right the first time around. Subsequently, humanity has to endure some rather disgraceful eras of cultures who didn’t get that right.

Returning to the original observation, I believe Aristotle was right and that there is such a thing as natural slaves. There are people who make what to someone who values freedom appears as counterproductive choices simply in order to have fewer options and less freedom so that they may enjoy a life with less responsibility. Those are what I would call natural slaves.

In going with the terminology, the fraction of natural slaves may be as high as 99 percent. In my mind, whenever I hear someone demand jobs or fair prices, I think “there goes someone with the natural slave mentality”. They’re frustrated because they’ve lost their masters or overlords or whatever you call them. This is someone who does not enjoy being free. This is someone who does not want to be free. For them, the responsibility that comes along with freedom is too much to bear. They need either a person or a system to tell them what to do. In exchange they’ll do what they’re told in exchange for being taken care off.

I feel this is an acceptable arrangement since it may be genetically conditioned (*WARNING* oxymoron!). As mentioned above, using attributes like body size, race, prisoners of war, heritage, etc. is a pretty poor method for determining who are natural slaves are who aren’t. Our current system of capitalism is a lot better by all accounts. If you want to be a natural slave, you sign up for debt and a job to pay it off. If you want to be free, you save money so you can lend it to those who prefer to be indebted and invest it in those who want it to increase their work productivity. The current system still has some flaws in that it doesn’t make this option clear to everybody. This is why I have this blog and why I wrote a book: To free those who aren’t natural slaves.

I am the Morpheus of the consumerism matrix.

However, much as 99% prefer to be natural slaves and much as 1% prefer to be natural masters, that is no excuse for abuse. Surely, the latter should be somehow compensated monetarily or otherwise for the burden of responsibility of “taking care” of the slaves by creating jobs, taking risks, etc. Capitalism provides the means of this. The problem is when this relationship is abused. Namely, to take the housing crisis as an example, when the masters lend money to the slaves knowing full well they can’t pay it back and when the slaves fail to do so, orchestrate a bailout that simply takes money from the rest of the slaves. That’s a one-sided relationship. This is not symbiotic. It’s parasitic with a ruling class simply extracting more value from the middle class than they provide in terms of government.

Normally, democracy would act as a control mechanism for this behavior. The fact that this behavior occurred indicates a failure of democracy. It is clear why. Uninformed voters can’t make informed choices, even when you bring 25% of them, or however many bothers to show up, for a “popular election”. You can not bring a crowd of people together and get anything better than the average common denominator. The ruling class has fully exploited this weakness.

In a sense, blogs like this also serve a democratic function. It makes people make deliberate choices. Here are the sides: Pick one. Let’s make it fair. Sometimes people tell me they don’t want to retire, that they’d rather find a job they’re passionate about. I say fine. If you want to retire, find that passionate sucker and hire him. He’ll be more productive using your money to leverage into his work. You’ll take the risk and everybody will benefit. That’s capitalism the way it should be. The capitalists carry the risk and the laborers carry the work.

The problem appears when the capitalists no longer carry the risk and expect labor to make up for it when they fuck up. That’s wrong. It’s inequitable. It goes against the spirit and definition of capitalism. It is only possible when the political system allows it.

And that’s where the developed world has and is failing, both in the US and in Europe.

Note: It’s probably possible to find a term other than “slaves” that contains less emotional baggage. I hope people well see beyond this and consider the term as it was original meant: Those who prefer that someone else to tell them what to do.

@Jacob,
Good call on Henry Ford there. It didn’t come to my mind immediately. That’s quite an apt reference here, because his workers did end up going on strike, by protesting against the mind numbing drudgery of it alll….. which bemused him to no end!

@LOL,
You can read more on that Ford quote and the tie-in to ERE, in the guest post I wrote here.

And here is the real kicker about the so called “gilded age”or the Fordian/Robber barons’ era:

This was actually part of a poster campaign during the 1920s!

Debt incumbent home owners don’t go on strike!

How much more of a damning indictment does one need about the game being rigged against the general populace?

jzt83 said,

Yeah, people are so ignorant. All they have to do is become a free agent and do things exactly on their terms with little compromise, and they will live a free and prosperous life. Economy schmeconomy. Unemployment is 9.1% and U6 unemployment rate is 17%. These are just numbers of zero consequence. Many people can just become entrepreneurs and sell stuff because EVERYONE has talents and skills they can profit well from. Nevermind the fact that the majority of businesses fail within a year. Those who fail are just ignorant because if they didn’t fail, they wouldn’t be ignorant. It’s all their fault for not succeeding at making money on their own terms.

Excellent post – I agree with the general idea that most people in these protests don’t really know what they want. They pointed out a problem, but failed to understand the cause of the problem. In most cases, I get this as most people would disagree with what I’m about to suggest.

The problem is the structure of civilization itself. There is always been a hierarchy to it and always will be thus the problem of uneven wealth will always occur. In order to get rid of the problem would require use to move past civilization itself into something else.

I’m always amazed how often people get lost in the details of these arguments. You the people control the government, so if you don’t like it change the system. If even 51% of that 99% agree (heck even less than that based on the latest voter turnouts), guess what it happens. The masters can bitch and whine, but you can choose to change things or even get rid or complete redo your style of government. If you think it will make things better you can even just default on your sovereign debt and rewrite your constitution (like Iceland is doing right now).

Yet these changes are typically superficial as they don’t address the core issue of the hierarchy itself. Perhaps we need to get creative and come up with another social organization. After all animals have tried lots of different methods of organization, why can’t we? Or are humans doomed to follow civilization into an early species grave?

As you can see, a developed country economy really does make it possible to have a tighter rein on budget and spending than a volatile developing country/economy….

Count your blessings then, all ye first worlders!

LOL said,

@ Surio:

> Amy Dacyczyn did it with kids

Not true. I guess we’ve read different versions of “Tightwad Gazette” :-).
Yeah, she has cut some expenses but she was buying expensive boat, house, farm, furniture, etc. She did not ERE either, since she just became a small business owner & writer who was making a lot of money. You might want to reread the book and pay more attention to details.
Here is the quote about her:
“During that time, another $38,000 went to major purchases such as cars, furnishings and appliances.”http://dandilyonfluff.com/2011/05/the-dacyczyn-decision-interview-with-americas-favorite-tightwad-amy-dacyczyn/
This is 100% opposite of what Jacob is trying to preach.

> If anything, Latin American, Southern European >and Asiatic cultures ought to be more offended by >the message of “Every man for himself” that you >accuse this blog of propagating.

No way. I would never be offended by “Every man for himself” motto, since I believe in it.
But the more I read the original article and Jacob’s latest comment, the more I think that he has just posted some very confusing statements, which are incorrect or inaccurate.

For example: “99% slaves” with the further clarification that “slave” means “slave mentality”, i.e. people who demand things.
First of all, it is a wrong number to use. 99% in a popular culture/media really applies to people who own 60% of wealth, i.e. top 1% owns ~40% (38% to be exact) of resources.
I don’t know what Jacob’s intentions were in using “99%”, but it seems like (from his comment) he meant totally different thing vs. what he used the number for.
IMHO, there is no correlation between “slave mentality” and 99% (“poor”) vs 1% (“rich”). I’d recommend to everyone to read “Richistan”. Great book, which shows that many of so called “rich” actually might have more “slave mentality” in comparison to most 99% “poor”.

Interesting post! Good comments, as well. Although I think you have too little faith in the intelligence of people.

You wrote– “Normally, democracy would act as a control mechanism for this behavior. The fact that this behavior occurred indicates a failure of democracy.”

Agreed.

But then– “It is clear why. Uninformed voters can’t make informed choices, even when you bring 25% of them, or however many bothers to show up, for a “popular election”. You can not bring a crowd of people together and get anything better than the average common denominator. The ruling class has fully exploited this weakness.”

That’s a little unfair. The small percentage of people who own much of the capital in most countries also control the multinational corporations which bring you your news, entertainment and so forth. It’s only in the past ten years, really, that people get their information from non-mainstream sources (specifically, the web) which have allowed things like #OccupyWallSt to occur.

Anywow, here’s something slightly unrelated, and yet that I think you may appreciate based on the content on this site. It’s about how to addict people to games like Farmville on Facebook by using currency, artificial shortages and psychology 101.

Jacob, keep up the good fight–I don’t think I’d agree with you on everything political, but your voice is very important, and under-heard. I plan on increasing your popularity, and if you don’t mind my comments, I’ll also inject the voice of someone who spent the first 34 years of my life trying to escape real difficulties imposed on me by abusive people–not things I could “choose” not to experience. Things I chose to plan to escape, worked hard to get out of. But things that someone like you may not have considered in the grand scheme of challenges to developing wealth.

Now, at 37, I have been able to make pretty much all the choices about my life for 3 years, and I rather like where things are going. And right now is a great time to listen to someone who echoes and expands on the life-wisdom of my Great Depression Era-raised granny.

You wrote, “The problem appears when the capitalists no longer carry the risk and expect labor to make up for it when they fuck up. That’s wrong. It’s inequitable. It goes against the spirit and definition of capitalism. It is only possible when the political system allows it.”

Some people truly are just whinging, did not take opportunities to educate themselves out of the debt-consumerism-mantra. Others really have been exploited. If you want to know what the most enlightened, intense members of OccupyWallStreet are up to, they’re focused on this specific problem:

That whatever their voice is, that whatever the problem is, whatever the solution is, they have had all political control taken away. Witness the call for a jobs-bill, answered by? an abortion bill. I’m not saying the jobs bill would have been brilliant, right, wrong, etc. … I’m saying it’s what people asked for, but instead received a very WEIRD law that came from … NOT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

Our politicians have been run by corporations on an increasingly intense basis over the last 30+ years, to the point that Congress cannot regulate ITSELF out of the situation. They follow the puppet-masters or they are destroyed, removed from “power.” It isn’t that OccupyWallStreet doesn’t know what it wants–it’s that it’s real protest, at the heart of the whole thing, is against having no voice. It is, underlying, not “the mob” but an attempt by We The People to say, “Please don’t push us to the point where we have NO other choice but to become the mob. Give us back our voice BEFORE the breaking point.”

People without jobs who have been looking for jobs sometimes run across niches in which they can make their own good luck, but at some point sheer numbers actually do win out. I win, in this scenario, because I’m smart, both college- and self-educated, and I know how to forecast the right spot to stand in when times are tough. Always have, it’s how I survived abuse. Not everyone knows how to think about that sort of thing–yes, natural “slaves,” followers. For every one of me, there are two or three jobs hungry for someone intelligent, inventive, strong, (and perhaps you might say “cunning,” but not in a cruel sense). But for every ten slaves there might be one job. There aren’t resources for them to even hear your voice–unemployment office gives them one answer, support groups give them one answer, society gives them one answer. No one says there might be another way, or if they do say it, they say it like a club over the head, accusing them of being wrong when, every step of the way, they were being told that what they were doing was right.

They aren’t fed anything but the debt-consumerism model and don’t know there is anything else–your blog is really the first place I’ve seen all these different threads brought together intelligently, not as a bash-the-poor commentary.

I’m a bit confused about one thing. Who says these protestors are making 80,000 a year and complaining? What about those on minimum wage? What about those who can’t find a job at all? Sure they could do what you’ve done if they make a salary which is reasonable enough that they can save some money – say 30,000 a year. But if you can only get a minimum wage job, there is no prospect of saving. It’s a struggle even just to live frugally, to make even 10,000 a year. You can’t just assume that everyone has the opportunity to make a reasonable salary for 5 years and hence can put away 80% of that reasonable salary. Not everyone has opportunity, and that’s what they’re protesting about.

Why not? I suspect they’d have a better chance of getting a job if they were working on bettering themselves or looking for a job as opposed to whining about why life isn’t fair. The 1% didn’t get to be the 1% by whining and asking for someone to give it to them. They got there by working hard and taking it for themselves.

ca2hill said,

Loved this post… you’ve put into words so many things, that I think, but couldn’t have expressed.

The “Occupy” movement has some legitimacy to it. That being the “system” has some clear short comings, but that tends to get lost (in my view) because a minority of protesters can actually state the issue.

I guess for me… I see the whole system as a game. You choose how you play it. As you said, 2 choices: get stuff, go in debt and pay your debtors OR save and become a debtor or investor and collect. The key being you choose.

But again, as you state… most see no choice (natural slaves) and we get scores of the middle class heavily in debt living beyond their means.

[…] the OWS movement (aka we are the 99 percent) started, much was offered by way of facts, opinion, stereotype busting, even metaphors and exhortion about the protests. While I feel somewhat […]

Guest said,

“The 1% didn’t get to be the 1% by whining and asking for someone to give it to them. They got there by working hard and taking it for themselves.”

Uh, remind me again who got billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, in addition to the profits they made by wrecking the global economy? I am so sick of this b.s. calvinist mythology that the wealthy have more virtue, more character, more BALLS, when the truth is they just have more lobbyists and are more sociopathic. And they get more welfare than anyone!

TulsaFred said,

Everyone likes conspiracy theories, it mskes them fel like they are smarter than everyone else .
There is no Wall Street conspiracy or corporation/state conspiracy. There is only capitalism being mucked up by politicians and politics.
It is wrong to say that capitalists are being “unfair” by avoiding their rightful risk by getting bailed out.
It is the politicians and the government who are solely to blame. They pushed the bailouts for fear of the consequences of allowing the large financial institutions and auto makers to fail. They did not do this because of the influence of he capitalists on Wall Street, though I’m sure those capitalists like anyone else (including most of the protesters) were keen on getting whatever they could from the government. No, they did it because our creeping social progressive culture would not accept the pain of possible financial and job collapse.
It likely would have been better to take the pain of allwing fannie and freddie and Goldman and BofA and GM to fail because rebuilding would have quickly occurred.
In the end though, the problem is the government and its coddling and entitling of the masses that is why America is beginning to fail and social unrest is occurring. But then again, that is the goal of he social progressives.

Jacob wrote a fantastic blog post. The main dissent seems to coming from an excuse mentality. “X can’t happen because X” which dominates the mentality of those who remain saddled with financial insecurity. I’ve seen it often enough in my personal life.

vivacious said,

I can make a very strong rebuttal to this post. Sorry but this is one of Jacob’s worst pieces of writing I’ve ever seen.

First of all, Occupy had the goal of reinstating Glass-Steagall. After WWII there was strong regulation which helped the economy. It kept commercial and investment banks separate, among other things. Since the Reagan-Thatcher era in the 80s there has been a very strong tendency towards deregulation in everything from the economy to media to the environment and a very Friedman centered approach, which Greenspan later admitted on live TV was a mistake.

Occupy was protesting these systemic failures. The privitization of profit and the socialization of risk.

Anyone who was pre FI had a right to be livid. Even post FI your investments would have tanked.

The 2007/2008 recession sent financial shockwaves all over the world. Many people are still recovering.

I can virtually guarantee no one here is the 1%. Nor will they ever be. And they aren’t even close. Those are the multimillionaires and billionaires that run the world.

There are only 2 things that make an economy. Making something or providing a service. It’s not possible for everyone to invest for a living. That’s one of the biggest problems of the modern economy, the overfinancialization of the economy since the 80s. ERE inherently wouldn’t work if a large number of people took it on. Furthermore, suppose a significant number of people started living ERE style. Wages would drop and costs would go up. You would be able to save much less money than you could now.

I agree with most of this website and reached similar conclusions independently. I only found it on a somewhat unrelated Google search.

I think we should be a little more careful about some of the underlying philosophy though.

One other aspect is luck. I’m not 100% sure but I think it was somewhere here that someone linked to a Bernanke commencement speech at Princeton. He somehow spent part of it talking about the role that luck plays in life which was an interesting moment of frankness from a pivotal financial figure. Effort is certainly a factor but think about the genetic lottery, who your parents are, being in the right place at the right time, having had access to universities one way or another, being born in America or Europe as opposed to say The Congo or Iraq, etc.

Jacob you sound like you’ve bought into the Conservative establishment myth by your tone in this post. If anything bad happens it’s YOUR fault. Environment is NEVER a factor. It’s a myth. Interestingly some of the poorest, most destitute people devoid of options often defend it the hardest.

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